What little of Damien Hirst's work I have seen has been by chance in a mag or website and I was unaware of him as an artist. A New York Times article I read recently introduced him as an artist similar to A.Warhol, controversial and lavish.  The article compared his former displays to his most recent, spot paintings.      

D. Hirst was asked to design the cover for Darwin's 150th anniversary edition of On the Origin of Species.  The painting is titled, "Human skull in space." (oil on canvas)

The way the gradient from true white to cool blue on the dark and smoky bkg, I feel, attributes the most to the depth of this piece.  It's also the choice of color (and knowing it is oil) that gets my attention first.    











Glass and silver casted medicine bottles by Hirst and R. Whiteread sit on a mirrored glass chess board.  Various artists designed different chess sets for this project. The more interesting ones would confuse the heck out of me in a real chess game, though.  One day, I would like a fancy chess set.   Photoshop may be a great tool for assisting in designing a fancy set for myself, one day.  I wonder what Hirst went through to get to the final product stages.  I'm not alone, I hope, in feeling no obvious similarities in chess and medicine bottles.  Or, maybe Hirst associates fogies with chess, or saw some fogies actually playing chess with medicine bottles.  To me it's like a poor man's vision of a rich man's chess set.  I think it's pretty awesome.